The symbiotic theatre: an evolutionary view of what's inside our heads apart from brain.
With apologies to Wole Soyinka

Sunday, April 14, 2013

Concepts. And hyperbollocks in eleven dimensions

Sethren, I return even thinner than I left.MadamMeMe’sMeatyBits will seem to me as the
cherries of Paradise.No fucker told me
that the holy monastery of Skellig Michael has been a ruin since the Sixth
Century.

And here in the world, I gather, the tapeworms of government
have been suffering orgasms of enraptured grief (insofar as a tapeworm’s orgasm
is distinguishable from a morbid twitch of the integument) because a decayed leader, one
who has brought about the ruin of our land and sold it off to global
corporations and bankers, one furthermore guilty of nepotistic embezzlement and
fraud, and therefore the moral beacon of all her tribe, has snuffed it.

Leader!A very
exemplar of the human stupidity of which I spoke before my involuntary fasting
in the wilderness on that rocky waste miles out in the Atlantic (I had imagined
mead and fish stew at least).She was
not a leader, she was a politician.Leaders are the cultural artefacts of war.Politicians are the mouthparts of power, and
power is ultimately wealth.Behind the
mouthparts of power is a great echo chamber, where demons become the size of
clouds, few, but huge in presence, and they bounce around and around, an
ever-present clangour.This dead person's clangour was the public bruting
of a counter-revolution already present, capital’s transition from production
to consumption, to siphoning off the atrophying wealth of the nation into the
proliferating proglottids of the City tapeworms.Beyond the dead's melancholy hooting, she was a
paltry human being, ignorant, spiteful, conservative, totally unilluminated by
any idea that could not be fully expressed in five words max.

Yet our present pundits beatify her.They attribute miracles.

Britannia had ruled the world, then this sceptred isle went down the
plug hole, but the dead person came trailing clouds of glory, and she put the Great back in Britain. And all the
peoples of the earth now bow the knee saying, behold, thou art great among
nations, the paragon of humankind, you Brits.

Hyperbollocks in eleven dimensions.Let us dismiss this irrelevance from our
discourse.

DemonthingactconceptmappraxisCulture

You will not believe this, sethren, but when I returned from
Africa to this land at the end of the Sixties (the people afire with Beatles,
Minis, car and skirt, street fashion and street revolution) to do a further
degree (for though I am now as you see me, in tattered robes, stained with the
filthy splash of passing traffic, I was once educated and full of promise) I
did not know what a concept was.Our
tutor kept using the word, and we students looked askance one at another.“Concept”, he would say, and none liked to
admit that they knew not the fuck what a concept was, in case they were alone
in their ignorance.Up to 1968 we, the
intellectual élite, got through life without the concept of a concept.

Yet Lev Vygotsky had made things plain, half a century
before.

Red triangle.Yellow
triangle.Yellow circle.Red circle.

What you see are pairs of demons (but remember that each
demon consorts with many kinship groups and even clouds of associate demons);
red; circle; triangle; blue.

A concept at its simplest is two demons, which still exist
independently elsewhere, but are now coupled. To go back further, it is two
loci of irreducible difference that, interlocked and superimposed, make a third
locus of irreducible difference.I am
reminded (as learned people say) of the disc of mammoth ivory with a mother
Auroch on one side and her calf on the other.Spin the disc, and they are side by side.The concept of a virtual superimposition of
two separate demons would be easily apprehensible to our ancestors 20,000 years
ago.And even today it not so
difficult. In a triangle that is wholly
red (not for instance bounded by a black line) the redness and the
triangularity are inseparable.Yet at
the same time we know perfectly well what component is redness, what
triangle, and can easily separate the one from the other, two pristine demons.

A red triangle has no sequence, except in syntax (and
language, as I have said, is a clumsy, hugely overdetermined system for locating demons in an ideoverse and transmitting them through the metaverse,
no more than that.Poets have long lamented this
state of affairs, while failing to note that overdetermination is what gives us
poetry.)

If… then…

Logic is a concept.Why I even approach it with the wind howling round my head here on theringroad I don’t know.Logic has sequence.The infant learns sequence young.

We are going out.We find
the pushchair.We put on something
warm.We are going shopping.We find a bag.Keys? We have keys.We unlock the door.We go out.We shut the door.We lock it.

Some of these acts can be done in another order.Others cannot.One thing must come before another.The basis of logic is already there.

If… then…

A precondition is a state of affairs that must necessarily
come before another state of affairs.Having a key is a precondition of unlocking the door.So is the door being locked in the first
place.Getting mush on a spoon is a
precondition of shoving it somewhere in the region of your mouth.If, and only if, there is mush on the spoon,
can I shove it in my gob.

Thus logic, in the form of Vygotsky’s natural concept, is
already there.The scientific concept
will take time to develop.If is a word that links to the demon precondition.At first glance it would seem more difficult,
more complicated to anatomise the demon precondition
than the demon red.Red
is of course almost pure demon.One can
produce a thousand demons, a million all keen to surround red, envelop it, stand for it; the electromagnetic spectrum, the
visual cortex; but we know full well that none of that busy-ness is red, sethren.Red is red, end of story.Pure demon if ever there was one.And
then you can make it into a
triangle.If too is pure demon."If I
am good can I have an ice cream?" "If, my
son.If."Pure demon simply understood.But
ask the child to anatomise the concept if, it
won’t have a clue.

If all cats have hearts, and Orlando is a cat, then Orlando
has a heart.

If all cats have hearts, and I have a heart, then I am a
cat.

The scientific concept of logic has to be developed, the
sequential coupling and obligate linkage (there can be no if without a then) of the if… then… demons has to be explored and refined.But the concept of logic is a relatively
simple one.

The demons that combine in alliances if one tries to
anatomise the demon movement are
multitudinous and hard to marshal, and thus the concept of movement is hard to
explain (except for “movement is when something moves”-type explanations).Yet movement is a very simple and basic
concept.It seems that concepts,
processes that are abstruse… er… conceptually, are much easier to recognise as
demons than simple things like needles, where the various bits (associated
demons) are obvious to the eye (or neural substrate if no needle is present).

Some concepts are quite extensive, the Standard Model, for instance.Others are less so.Food, for
instance.Our bellies rumble, craving
mechanically recovered horse slurry, the poisonous soya, glutinous white sludge
embrowned by who knows what magic into gravy.Madam MeMe subverts our hunger, elicits self-destructive craving.As a picture puzzle in the search for
concepts, let me commend to you the work of the great Martin Rowson.The horror. The horror.

About Me

Old man, still puzzled, amused, horrified by the world. Question struck me, why are human beings, individually so intelligent, collectively so stupid? We have religious, political, factual beliefs that look like certainties. Yet if one lot is right (Yaweh is God, debt is sin) the rest of us are in error. That means most of us are wrong most of the time. How’s that work?
Seems we’re not rational creatures, though one of our special tricks is we can “do” reason. Our big brains are an environment where culture evolves. Survival is the driving force of culture, and a lie can usually survive better than the truth. Culture? Darwinian process in the virtual space where all our brains meet—not mystical, any more than cyberspace. Real, where processes continue. Needs discussion. So I blog about it.
I also have a life. A novel, Bad to the Bone, some plays on. I read, eat, drink a lot. My grandchildren say I swear too much, but what’s just enough? Crazy about mountain and road biking. I talk a bit, my wife says. Love music. The person who I have most admired ever is Wangari Maathai. Brother Jero is just the voice that comes to me when I try to blog about Evoculture.